Students React To Federal Prohibition On Sodas During Lunch Time By Creating Black Market

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Written By:
Rob Port

May 31, 2012
12:01am

As part of the federal government’s war on fat kids, they’ve put restrictions on when vending machines selling sodas and sugary snacks can be used. Specifically, those vending machines can’t be operational in areas where students eat lunch during lunch time.

The students at Davis High School in Salt Lake City, Utah weren’t going to take this sort of nanny statism lying down, so they began selling sodas during lunch time by way of the student store. Unfortunately, when the federal government got wind (because that’s what we pay federal tax dollars for these days, for bureaucrats to police school lunch rooms) they smacked the school with a big fine.

In order to remain eligible for federal subsidies for school lunches, officials at Davis High School in Salt Lake City, Utah, knew they weren’t allowed to have active vending machines selling soda and candy in the school lunchroom during the 47-minute lunch period.

But rules designed to keep kids from washing down their lunches with something fizzy can be tricky. That lesson was driven home when the state Office of Education’s Child Nutrition Program hit the school with a $15,862 fine—75 cents per violation over the period of many months that it turns out students had been illicitly selling soda in the school store.

Fearing more fines, the school has pulled the plug on all of its vending until it can figure out what the rules require. Because students eat lunch in the hallways, vending may actually be banned throughout the school.

That our federal government is policing the nation’s lunch rooms this closely is absurd, and indicative of a national government that is out of control. School lunch rooms ought to be a local issue.

But this is also yet another example of how prohibitionist policies don’t work. Where there is demand, there will be supply. As long as kids want candy and chips and soda they’ll find a way to get them. To the extent that there is an obesity problem – and I think the “epidemic” is more than a little overblown – you don’t solve it by removing choices. You solve it by encouraging the kids to make better choices.